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Friday, August 10th, 2018

Very valuable observations from Paul on his travels, talking to developers and business people about progressive web apps—there’s some confusion out there.

My personal feeling is that everyone is really hung up on the A in PWA: ‘App’. It’s the success and failure of the branding of the concept; ‘App’ is in the name, ‘App’ is in the conscious of many users and businesses and so the associations are quite clear.

Friday, August 3rd, 2018

I got an intriguing email recently from someone who’s a member of The Session, the community website about Irish traditional music that I run. They said:

When I recently joined, I used my tablet to join. Somewhere I was able to download The Session app onto my tablet.

But there is no native app for The Session. Although, as it’s a site that I built, it is, a of course, progressive web app.

They went on to say:

I wanted to put the app on my phone but I can’t find the app to download it. Can I have the app on more than one device? If so, where is it available?

I replied saying that yes, you can absolutely have it on more than one device:

But you don’t find The Session app in the app store. Instead you go to the website https://thesession.org and then add it to your home screen from your browser.

My guess is that this person had added The Session to the home screen of their Android tablet, probably following the “add to home screen” prompt. I recently added some code to use the window.beforeinstallprompt event so that the “add to home screen” prompt would only be shown to visitors who sign up or log in to The Session—a good indicator of engagement, I reckon, and it should reduce the chance of the prompt being dismissed out of hand.

So this person added The Session to their home screen—probably as a result of being prompted—and then used it just like any other app. At some point, they didn’t even remember how the app got installed:

Success! I did it. Thanks. My problem was I was looking for an app to download.

On the one hand, this is kind of great: here’s an example where, in the user’s mind, there’s literally no difference between the experience of using a progressive web app and using a native app. Win!

But on the other hand, the expectation is still that apps are to be found in an app store, not on the web. This expectation is something I wrote about recently (and Justin wrote a response to that post). I finished by saying:

Perhaps the inertia we think we’re battling against isn’t such a problem as long as we give people a fast, reliable, engaging experience.

When this member of The Session said “My problem was I was looking for an app to download”, I responded by saying:

Well, I take that as a compliment—the fact that once the site is added to your home screen, it feels just like a native app. :-)

Wednesday, June 29th, 2016

Colin pointed out this interesting perspective from an iOS developer moving to the web:

My work for the last few years has been on the web, and honestly, it’s a breath of fresh air. Instant refreshing, surprisingly good debugging / perf tools, intrinsically multi-platform, and most importantly, open.

Web tech gets a lot of shit from native devs (some of it deserved). But the alternatives are worse. I find the entire concept of App Review morally questionable despite Apple’s good intentions. So I sleep better at night not being part of that anymore. Sure, the web is messy, and it’s delicate, but it’s important and good and getting better fast.

Saturday, June 11th, 2016

Remember when Chrome developers decided to remove the “add to home screen” prompt for progressive web apps that used display: browser in their manifest files? I wasn’t happy.

Alex wrote about their plans to offer URL access for all installed progressive web apps, regardless of what’s in the manifest file. I look forward to that. In the meantime, it makes no sense to punish the developers who want to give users access to URLs.

The browser’s goal is clear: create a hurdle tall enough that only sites that meet user expectations of “appyness” will be prompted for. Maybe Chrome’s version of this isn’t great! Feedback like Ada’s, Andrew’s, and Jeremy’s is helpful is letting us know how to improve. Thankfully, in most of the cases flagged so far, we’ve anticipated the concerns but maybe haven’t communicated our thinking as well as we should have. This is entirely my fault. This post is my penance.

It turns out that the home-screen prompt was just the first stab. There’s a really interesting idea Alex talks about called “ambient badging”:

Wouldn’t it be great if there were a button in the URL bar that appeared whenever you landed on a PWA that you could always tap to save it to your homescreen? A button that showed up in the top-level UI only when on a PWA? Something that didn’t require digging through menus and guessing about “is this thing going to work well when launched from the homescreen?”

I really, really like this idea. It kind of reminds me of when browsers would flag up whether or not a website had an RSS feed, and allow you to subscribe right then and there.

Hold that thought. Because if you remember the history of RSS, it ended up thriving and withering based on the fortunes of one single RSS reader.

Whenever the discoverability of progressive web apps comes up, the notion of an app store for the web is inevitably floated. Someone raised it as a question at one of the Google I/O panels: shouldn’t Google provide some kind of app store for progressive web apps? …to which Jake cheekily answered that yes, Google should create some kind of engine that would allow people to search for these web apps.

Also, I find it kind of odd that people think that it needs to be a company the size of Google that would need to build any kind of progressive web app store. It’s the web! Anybody can build whatever they want, without asking anyone else for permission.

So if you’re the entrepreneurial type, and you’re looking for the next Big Idea to make a startup out of, I’ve got one for you:

Build a directory of progressive web apps.

Call it a store if you want. Or a marketplace. Heck, you could even call it a portal, because, let’s face it, that’s kind of what app stores are.

Opera have already built you a prototype. It’s basic but it already has a bit of categorisation. As progressive web apps get more common though, what we’re really going to need is curation. Again, there’s no reason to wait for somebody else—Google, Opera, whoever—to build this.

Oh, I guess I should provide a business model too. Hmmm …let me think. Advertising masquerading as “featured apps”? I dunno—I haven’t really thought this through.

Anyway, you might be thinking, what will happen if someone beats you to it? Well, so what? People will come to your progressive web app directory because of your curation. It’s actually a good thing if they have alternatives. We don’t want a repeat of the Google Reader situation.

It’s hard to recall now, but there was a time when there wasn’t one dominant search engine. There’s nothing inevitable about Google “owning” search or Facebook “owning” social networking. In fact, they both came out of an environment of healthy competition, and crucially neither of them were first to market. If that mattered, we’d all still be using Yahoo and Friendster.

So go ahead and build that progressive web app store. I’m serious. It will, of course, need to be a progressive web app itself so that people can install it to their home screens and perhaps even peruse your curated collection when they’re offline. I could imagine that people might even end up with multiple progressive web app stores added to their home screens. It might even get out of control after a while. There’d need to be some kind of curation to help people figure out the best directory for them. Which brings me to my next business idea:

Tuesday, June 7th, 2016

Smart thinking from Alex on how browsers could better indicate that a website is a progressive web app (and would therefore benefit from being added to the home screen). Ambient badging, he calls it.

Wouldn’t it be great if there were a button in the URL bar that appeared whenever you landed on a PWA that you could always tap to save it to your homescreen? A button that showed up in the top-level UI only when on a PWA? Something that didn’t require digging through menus and guessing about “is this thing going to work well when launched from the homescreen?”

Friday, January 22nd, 2016

A fascinating slice of ethnographic research in Myanmar by Craig. There’s no mention of the web, which is certainly alarming, but then again, that’s not the focus of the research.

Interestingly, while Facebook is all omnipresent and dominant, nobody is using it the way that Facebook wants: all the accounts are basically “fake”.

What I found fascinating are the ways that people have found to bypass app stores. They’re basically being treated as damage and routed ‘round. So while native apps are universal, app stores would appear to be a first world problem.

Now if there were only some kind of universally accessible distribution channel that didn’t require any kind of installation step …hmmm.

Wednesday, July 2nd, 2014

With the usual caveat that I wish this were published on Craig’s own site, I particularly like this passage:

Apps, too, are ephemeral. Some of the most ephemeral software we’ve ever produced. Ephemeral if for no other reason than because of their gated homes. Our apps cower below the fickle whim of App Store Gods, struck down for no reasonable reasons or for very reasonable reasons. It doesn’t matter which, the end result is always the same: gone, forever.